Democratizing education? Examining access and usage patterns in massive open online courses

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often characterized as remedies to educational disparities related to social class. Using data from 68 MOOCs offered by Harvard and MIT between 2012 and 2014, we find that course participants from the United States tend to live in more affluent and better-educated neighborhoods than the average U.S. resident. Among those who do register for courses, students with greater socioeconomic resources are more likely to earn a certificate. Furthermore, these differences in MOOC access and completion are larger for adolescents and young adults, the traditional ages where people find on-ramps into STEM coursework and careers. Our findings raise concerns that MOOCs and similar approaches to online learning can exacerbate rather than reduce disparities in educational outcomes related to socioeconomic status. One Sentence Summary:In 68 massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Harvard and MIT, students with greater socioeconomic resources enrolled and earned certificates at higher rates. Main Text:For nearly a century, technologists have promised that new broadcast media will bridge resource gaps between students in more and less privileged environments. "With radio the underprivileged school becomes the privileged" was the promise in the 1930s(1); in the 1960's boosters declared that television would "make available to these young people instruction of a higher order than they might otherwise receive"(2). In the first years of the 2010s, technologists have heralded the possibility that massive open online courses (MOOCs) can "democratize education " (3-5). Previous generations of broadcast and interactive technologies-film, radio, television, personal computers, Internet access, and Web 2.0 platforms-have yet to fulfill the promise of educational parity(6), and these new claims from MOOC advocates warrant empirical study. In this study, we take advantage of the data collected from MOOC students about their demographics and course performance-generally unavailable in studies of broadcast technologies-to present a portrait of registration and completion patterns in 68 courses offered by Harvard and MIT on the edX platform.Our analytical framework is guided by Attewell's argument that the "digital divide," the gap in education technology opportunities between students from different backgrounds, is best understood as two divides: one of access and one of usage(7). More and less affluent students not only have different levels of basic access to emerging technologies; they use them for different purposes with different levels of support from mentors. Historically, digital divides of usage have compounded digital divides of access. Surveys from the National Assessment of 2 Educational Progress in 1996 and 2011 show that students from schools serving mostly affluent students were more likely to use computers for simulations or modeling; by contrast, students from schools serving low-income students were more likely to use computers for drill and practice exercises (8,9). Com...

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